Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [337]
If Brahms habitually flirted with “respectable” ladies, he could not abide any female taking the initiative or showing signs of courting him for his fame. One woman recalled a day when she was fifteen and strolling on the Ringstrasse, and saw Brahms looking over some concert posters near the Opera. “I sidled up and gazed adoringly at him. With his great deep blue eyes, he returned my glance most expressively. We walked along like this, keeping parallel, until we came to where the Goethe monument now stands. Here … I blurted out: ‘Good day, Herr Doktor!’ That broke the spell. He gave out two queer, gruff, staccato sounds, more like the yap of an outraged dog than anything else, and turned abruptly away.”14
In 1888, Hermine Spies met Brahms at the train in Basel and was shocked by how gray he had become, seemingly all of a sudden. He would not have missed that she was so upset by his appearance that at first she could barely speak. Then she saw his “beautiful blue young-man’s eyes and the fresh, dear features,” and her gaze softened again.15 Once his line about marriage had been that he was too poor, a vagabond. Now it was becoming that he was too old. “I could not marry now,” he exploded to a company one night, in another of his sudden furies. “I could not help despising a girl for taking me for a husband. Surely you are not going to persuade me that anybody could fall in love with me, as I am now?… What else could attract them? My money? My art?” He concluded with grim satisfaction, “to be accepted out of admiration … I should have to despise her.”16 Behind all that he may have had a once-handsome man’s horror of losing his looks, the instant attraction women used to have for him.
If he could be brutally curt to friends and strangers alike, Brahms still blushed and wept easily. At Brüll’s house Richard Specht saw the tears start from his eyes as he looked over his own arrangement of the folk song “The Fair Jewess.” He turned away in embarrassment, growling into his beard, “Why must this thing always get to me so?”17
In his fashion, Brahms remained modest and generous and often self-deprecating, but he did not escape the effects of fame. In his age he could not abide being contradicted, took it for granted that he was the center of every company. He maintained his chosen masks: the Master to be approached at peril, the eminence grise, the gruff hard-drinking bourgeois preferring the company of men or in mixed company telling naughty stories to the ladies. He played the old scamp, the old rogue, flirting with every pretty face and everyone’s daughter. But he looked and did not touch beyond a playful squeeze, laughed and held forth and gave lavish gifts but in the end gave nothing of himself beyond his art. Ruthlessly, he had sunk the fair features and moonstruck soul of Young Kreisler under the patriarchal beard and forbidding bark of Herr Doktor Brahms.
• • •
DURING APRIL OF 1888, the month before an Italian trip with Josef Viktor Widmann, Brahms wrote Clara Schumann about a new treasure in his collection, the original version of Robert’s D Minor Symphony. The piece had been composed in 1841 and revised in 1851, to adapt it to the deficiencies of Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf. After studying the original scoring in the manuscript, Brahms concluded that the later version, the one always performed, amounted to a makeshift, turgid compared to the lighter touch of the original. He wrote Clara, “Everyone who sees [the original] agrees with me that